Not all of us with Still’s had quite the same symptoms. Ivy Horrocks was blind, although she was in the middle of a long series of operations which might do something to restore her sight. Her problem must have been acute iritis, caused by the disease from which we all suffered, with antibodies in her case attacking the eyes. Wendy told us Ivy was a witch who would put the evil eye on us, but that may just have been politeness on her part, wanting to establish her friend on an equal footing of malevolence.
I was fascinated by Ivy’s books, of which she was very proud. They were made up of raised dots in enchanting patterns. In a genuinely rather witchy way, Ivy’s eyes seemed to have migrated down her arms to her fingertips. Reading for her was now something that took place outside her head.
Sarah Morrison had senior status in the group, not because she was the oldest but because she had contracted the illness the youngest. She had been eighteen months old. She had been born in India, which meant she could eat the spicy food called curry without dying. She collected dolls. They were all from different countries and some of them had strange foreign names.
A girl called Geraldine, who was given to silent sobbing, could play chess, but as there was no one else who could, and no one who wanted to learn, her accomplishment didn’t raise her status noticeably or even help her to pass the time.
Wally Snorts the Posh
As for me, I tried to sell myself as the son of an Air Force pilot war hero, but that made no impression, whether because an audience of girls wasn’t susceptible to that brand of glamour, or because in our strange way we were a meritocracy, one of the few enclaves in the country at that time where it didn’t matter what your father did as long as you said ‘toilet’ and not ‘lavatory’. I was branded as Wally Snorts the Posh in Wendy’s eyes, and I couldn’t do anything about that, but I did manage to use Charlie to broker an enlarged identity.
I said that my best friend was a budgie who knew all my secrets, and that he would soon be coming to live with me on the ward. I knew perfectly well that pets of any sort were forbidden at CRX, but it was worth fibbing for the short-term advantage. Until I was found out, I could make any number of promises about what Charlie would do when he came to live on the ward, the words we’d teach him, whose bed his cage could be stood by at night. If they were really nice to me, that is.
Mary was my closest friend on the ward, not only because of her sweet nature but because we shared a passion for books. We would read Famous Five adventures together. We were always coming up with some altruistic scheme or other. The altruism was stronger in Mary, but I wasn’t going to show myself up in front of her. Because I had a gramophone on top of my locker but no records, we decided to write a letter of appeal to Decca on behalf of the ward. It wasn’t quite true that I had no records — there were a number at home that Mum would happily have brought in, but I didn’t dare risk Wendy’s contempt about my posh tastes. It seemed to me that Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ was the quintessence of posh, and there was an aria from La Bohème that I also loved, but I wasn’t going to risk that either.
The letter Mary and I concocted to send to Decca hit the jackpot. They sent us a whole box of 78s. I suppose they were old stock, but I didn’t mind. They were all operatic highlights. So I was even able to hear that aria without having to own up to my love for it. Of course it wasn’t the repertoire the ward would have chosen for itself. Popular taste would have opted for Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele and Frankie Lymon. Frankie Lymon in particular hit the bullseye with a song about not being a juvenile delinquent. He preached a sermon that adults couldn’t object to, and still he filled your head with thoughts of being bad.
Just when I was beginning to give up on the educational component of the institution, the school began to keep more than Brigadoon hours. Lessons started at last. There was no school-room as such — lessons were held right there in the ward. The first subjects I remember being taught at CRX were music and scripture.
Miss Reid sang songs in her reedy voice. There was a piano at the end of the ward. ‘Please, Miss Reid,’ I would say, ‘will you pick up my pencil?’ She bent over to do it, saying, not unkindly, ‘I shall have to call you Dropper.’ She taught us, ‘Soldier, soldier, will you marry me?’ but she blushed scarlet, as we knew she would, when we asked if anyone had ever proposed to her. After a moment when it didn’t seem that she’d be able to speak, she said, ‘Yes. Someone did once, as a matter of fact.’ Of course we all cried out, ‘And what did you say?’ Though we knew the answer. If she had said ‘Yes’ she wouldn’t still be a Miss and she wouldn’t be teaching sick kids. It was still a surprise, somehow, when she said, ‘I said No.’
Playing thickly
Miss Reid’s lessons were fine, though she could only pick out a tune on the piano with one finger. What we really loved was when Mrs Pullen played thickly. Playing thickly meant using all her fingers, and all at once in great bunches. Playing chords. I looked longingly at the piano, which could make such a complex sound, but for some reason I was only ever assigned the triangle or tambourine.
In terms of equipment, the school at CRX was a step up from Miss Collins’s portable blackboard, wiped clean by the hanky she kept in her sleeve, but only a step. A school within a hospital was unlikely to attract inspirational staff. It was a legal requirement that we should be educated. It would have been unlawful to strand us without lessons, even those of us who were not going to see another birthday. Yet there wasn’t a strong sense of what we were being educated for. What, if anything, we were going to become.
The phantom school at CRX, so timid, so likely to vanish into the woodwork when a doctor appeared, didn’t concern itself with discipline. No matter — Sister Heel took care of that, and it was still her ward when lessons, by her gracious permission, were taking place there. If we children talked after lights out, the procedure was: first, dire warnings. After that the offender’s bed would be pulled into the middle of the ward. If we still hadn’t learned our lesson, the bed was trundled into a side ward where we had to stay until morning. In the morning there would be a full-dress dressing-down from Sister Heel, a proper scolding. As we waited for morning we learned how cracked hospital mugs feel in the seconds before their public smashing.
Early in my stay in the hospital, an astounding thing happened on Ward Two. A boy with Still’s Disease came down with measles, and when the measles cleared up so did the rheumatoid arthritis. The lesser illness carried off the greater on its back. Professor Bywaters was fascinated and did every test he could think of. He would have been happy for the boy to stay on the ward until the mechanism of this absurd cure was understood, but the boy no longer needed to be looked after. He wasn’t a patient any more, and he wasn’t going to loiter around. Gregory went home.
The mystical action of the measles cure was as mysterious as the way white wine lifts a stain of red, leaving the tablecloth none the worse for wear. And after all, the person who first tried that desperate bit of dinner-party alchemy must have been something of a mystic, or else only threw the second glassful in a fit of temper.